What type of storage does Facebook use?
While the industry has moved on to 6 TB and 8 TB drives, Facebook is still using 4 TB drives, for a total of 120 TB per Knox array. Facebook partitions the nine Knox storage array into two slices, with 15 drives allocated to each of the 18 Leopard nodes.
The Facebook app can take up a ton of storage on your phone. Even browsing the timeline adds temporary and cached files to your device which consumes valuable space. Clearing up these files is simple: Delete and re-install the app.
Each data center houses tens of thousands of computer servers, which are networked together and linked to the outside world through fiber optic cables. Every time you share information on Facebook, the servers in these data centers receive the information and distribute it to your network of friends.
As you can see, this means that an hour a day of using Facebook on your smartphone could cost you around half a gigabyte of data. Over a week this amounts to around 3.5GB (500 x 7) and across a month you'll be in the region of 14GB.
Facebook built Haystack, an object storage system designed for storing photos on a large scale. The platform stores over 260 billion images which amounts to over 20 petabytes of data. One billion new photos are uploaded each week which is approx—60 terabytes of data.
Facebook is one of the biggest tech company which is not using AWS or Azure. No cloud for that matter is being used by Facebook to store its data. Facebook is running their own infrastructure to meet their needs, as Facebook had a very large number of users at a point of time when AWS was developing back in 2009.
One of the reasons your data usage at the end of the month may be more than expected is media-rich apps auto-playing videos and displaying high-quality photos by default. In this Ting Tip, we're going to show you how to limit Facebook data usage for both Android phones and iPhones.
On your phone, go to Settings–>Apps and notifications–>See all apps and tap Facebook. Open Storage and cache and select Clear cache. If you're clearing the cache for troubleshooting, you might want to tap Clear data.
Scroll to the bottom of Facebook and tap Settings & Privacy. Tap Media below Preferences. Tap to select Less, Normal or More and tap Save.
You don't store images or files in a database, you only store data (numbers, text, etc). The files themselves are simply stored in a content distribution network that can serve up the images to browsers based on closest location. The NAMES of those images might be stored in a database somewhere.
How long is Facebook data stored?
According to Facebook's website today, it takes 90 days to delete data stored in backup systems. “Some information, such as messaging history, isn't stored in your account,” Facebook's website states.
Given the data modeling flexibility of SQL and the ubiquity of MySQL when FB started, this social graph was initially built as a PHP application powered by MySQL as the persistent database and memcache as a “lookaside” cache.

We're here to help. If you use the "Clear Data" button on your Android phone to clear the local data, that is all you're clearing. Anything related to your account that is stored on your device will go away, but your primary account info, and anything else stored on Facebook's servers, is still out there.
To clear the Facebook app's cache on your iPhone, you can head into the app's "Settings & Privacy" menu to clear its browser cache, and delete and reinstall the app to fully clear its cached data.
A text-only message may consume 10-20 kilobytes. Attaching emojis, photos, or GIFs may use more data to open and read the text.
Object storage systems allow retention of massive amounts of unstructured data in which data is written once and read once (or many times). Object storage is used for purposes such as storing objects like videos and photos on Facebook, songs on Spotify, or files in online collaboration services, such as Dropbox.
Object storage, also known as object-based storage, is a computer data storage architecture designed to handle large amounts of unstructured data. Unlike other architectures, it designates data as distinct units, bundled with metadata and a unique identifier that can be used to locate and access each data unit.
Object storage takes each piece of data and designates it as an object. Data is kept in separate storehouses versus files in folders and is bundled with associated metadata and a unique identifier to form a storage pool.
One of Facebook's data centers in Prineville, Oregon. Facebook's services rely on fleets of servers in data centers all over the globe — all running applications and delivering the performance our services need.
The 970,000-square-foot facility is being constructed on 345 acres in the business park on the east side of Beech Road and south of the state Route 161 interchange. The Facebook datacenter will be a 970,000 square foot building, located in northern Utah County, at the Sweetwater Industrial Park in Eagle Mountain, Utah.
Where are Facebook data center?
Our data center fleet
Meta data centers are located in the United States, Europe and Singapore, and we are committed to making a positive impact in the places where we operate. This map highlights the renewable energy projects, water stewardship efforts and sustainability features that support our data centers.
One way you can avoid overage charges on your bill is to limit data usage by apps like Facebook, which is one of the hungriest apps on your phone. Normal use of the Facebook app—browsing your News Feed and looking at photos—consumes about 1.5MB per minute. Watching videos on Facebook uses around 2.6MB per minute.
Any app or activity that requires an internet connection will use gigabytes on your smartphone, assuming you're not connected to WiFi. This includes common online tasks such as: Scrolling through and posting on social media. Checking and sending email.
A lot of us love to use it, but the hard truth is, Facebook Messenger can take up more space on your phone than you think. The app is constantly caching information about your usage to your device – and all that info ends up staying on your phone.
When you use a browser, like Chrome, it saves some information from websites in its cache and cookies. Clearing them fixes certain problems, like loading or formatting issues on sites.
You'll be surprised to see how much storage space your text messages take on your smartphone. You may not even realize those messages are being saved to your phone. Don't worry, you can delete them. Be sure to delete messages with photos and videos first — they chew up the most space.
Check Data Usage in Settings
Check to see which apps are using data. On many newer Android devices, you can go to “Settings” > “Data Usage” > “Cellular data usage“, then scroll down to see which apps are using the most data.
Facebook Statistics on Data and Usage. Facebook generates 4 petabytes of data per day—that's a million gigabytes. All that data is stored in what is known as the Hive, which contains about 300 petabytes of data.
- Open your phone's Settings app.
- Tap Network & internet. Internet.
- Next to your carrier, tap Settings .
- Tap Data warning & limit.
- If it's not already on, turn on Set data limit. Read the on-screen message and tap Ok.
- Tap Data limit.
- Enter a number. ...
- Tap Set.
Most users only get one GB of storage for free. If you want more space, you have to pay for it. Photos uploaded to Facebook are compressed to save space on the site's servers.
How much is a Petabyte of storage?
An extremely large unit of digital data, one Petabyte is equal to 1,000 Terabytes. Some estimates hold that a Petabyte is the equivalent of 20 million tall filing cabinets or 500 billion pages of standard printed text.
Tera- means 1,000,000,000,000; a Terabyte is a trillion bytes. Peta- means 1,000,000,000,000,000; a Petabyte is 1,000 Terabytes. Exa- means 1,000,000,000,000,000,000; an Exabyte is 1,000 Petabytes.
To clear the Facebook app's cache on your iPhone, you can head into the app's "Settings & Privacy" menu to clear its browser cache, and delete and reinstall the app to fully clear its cached data.
Note: You can upload up to 1000 photos to an album.
Facebook Messenger, like most other platforms, has limits on the size of files you can attach to your message. You can upload a file up to 25MB in size, which is the same size limit as Google has for Gmail. For sharing large files (more than 25MB in size), you can use cloud storage services.
Or do you have to create more albums for those photos? If you have 1,000+ images to upload, one album isn't enough, as Facebook allows users to upload only a maximum of 1,000 photos and videos to one album. The good thing is that it's easy to create an album on Facebook.
Units larger than a terabyte include a petabyte, exabyte, zettabyte, yottabyte and brontobyte.
So how many gigabytes or megabytes are in a terabyte? 1 TB equals 1,000 gigabytes (GB) or 1,000,000 megabytes (MB). Now, let's compare that to physical storage devices we use every day. Compared to the average smartphone, 1 TB of storage is the same as roughly 16 (64 GB) iPhones or Samsung Galaxy devices.
Your Google Account starts with 15 GB of included cloud storage to use across Google Drive, Gmail, and Google Photos. You can buy more storage within Google Drive, or upgrade to Google One, to get extra benefits.
A brontobyte is a measure of memory or data storage that is equal to 10 to the 27th power of bytes. There are approximately 1,024 yottabytes in a brontobyte. Approximately 1,024 brontobytes make up a geopbyte.
What goes after TB?
Therefore, after terabyte comes petabyte. Next is exabyte, then zettabyte and yottabyte. However, binary does not operate on the same scale as SI.
The internet in numbers
The indexed web contains 2.25 billion pages. 4.95 billion people used the internet in January 2022 (62.5% of the world's population)
Clearing the cache resets the app so that it will remove your login information and other temporary files. You will need to sign in to your Facebook account again.
We're here to help. If you use the "Clear Data" button on your Android phone to clear the local data, that is all you're clearing. Anything related to your account that is stored on your device will go away, but your primary account info, and anything else stored on Facebook's servers, is still out there.
Business Insider's Matthew Stuart notices that Facebook keeps expanding the amount of storage it takes up on his iPhone the more he uses it because Facebook opens up links within the app on its own internal browser instead of on an external browser like Chrome or Safari. Facebook has designed its app so that whenever ...